Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For anyone watching peak oil this has been a busy week. The Harvard report by Leonardo Maugeri, covered in last week’s newsletter, has been seized upon by those waiting for a chance to consign peak oil to the dustbin of history. In Britain, columnist George Monbiot fell for it hook line and sinker, presenting the report as conclusive proof that peak oil is bunk – evidently without a moment’s critical appraisal…read on for exclusive analysis…
America has a new word to learn: Dilbit. Dilbit, short for diluted bitumen, is a combination of tar sands crude (bitumen) and dangerous liquid chemicals like benzene (the dilutant) used to thin crude so it can be piped to refineries. And there is a lot of it being piped into America — in some cases through the backyards of communities that don’t even know it’s there.
Are lower oil prices good news? Not really, if it means the world is sinking into recession.
The social dimensions of the end of growth are coming into clearer focus with each passing month –from last year’s Occupy uprisings, to the recent NATO demonstrations in Chicago, to mass demonstrations in Spain, and on and on. Also clearer is the desperate strategy of the powerful, which consists primarily of the militarization of the police and the criminalization of dissent.
I can’t really blame George Monbiot or anyone else for buying the narrative hype. Right now the overwhelming narrative is that we have no energy constraints at all. Folks wonder aloud whether the US should join OPEC. Increasingly ridiculous projections are made about the potential of shale oil and new drilling techniques. Slight upticks are assumed to be headed to their logical extremes, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government issues a report saying we’ve got all the oil we could ever want. So is it really surprising that Monbiot, who has been focused on climate change, not peak oil, is buying the story, asks Treehugger?
During the 20th century an indispensible yet unrecognized factor allowed the health sciences to attain dizzying levels of organizational complexity and achieve countless life saving and prolonging breakthroughs. The health professions drew upon ever-increasing amounts of human and natural resources, particularly energy…Therefore, the complexity of modern health systems and their accomplishments are an epiphenomenon of economic expansion made possible first and foremost by natural resources; only secondarily are they reflections of capital and labor expressed through human intelligence, drive and ingenuity. The era of cheap and plentiful energy is over and this has profound implications for the health sciences and modern world.
George Monbiot said in a recent article that “We were wrong about peak oil. There is enough to fry us all”. He is wrong on peak oil, but right with his general conclusion. There are enough fossil fuels to fry us all.
George Monbiot announced in the Guardian on Monday “We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all”, an article which concluded “peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time”. Several people have written, and even stopped me while I’ve been out shopping, to ask for my take on his piece, so here it is. It has been a tricky thing to write, as in the time it took me to compose it, so many other interesting analyses of it have been posted, many of which I have tried to reference here…What he does prompt is a rethink in terms of how we present peak oil.
– Oil Declines After Biggest Gain Since 2009 on Europe
– Protests to continue against Shell Arctic drilling
– EU begins boycott of Iranian oil
– China responds to Fukushima
– Monbiot: We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all
– David Strahan on Peakonomics: why the oil price slide is temporary
– Peak Plastic: One Generation’s Trash Is Another Generation’s Treasure
– Peak Blame (interview with Mark Robinowitz of OilEmpire.us)
– Der Energieforscher Ferdi Schüth über die Energiewende und die Zeit danach (interview)
– Peak oil and the lost message of the carbon tax in Australia
While I feel this conference [in Vienna] was disappointing in general, the organisers are not to blame. They did their best and produced the programme that had to be, with ASPO opening itself to the wider society. But after 10 years of activity ASPO’s message has failed to pass. Policy makers, climatologists, the energy industry, by and large are all yet to fully acknowledge the problem and its implications.
Evidently growing public concern about the inevitable decline in world oil production has rankled some powerful people, who’ve been knotting their ropes in search of a bit of favorable data to use as the pretext for a public lynching…The Peak Oil debate is not a sporting event. What matters is not which side wins, but what reality awaits us.
